Cultural Intelligence for Winning the Peace

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Location: The Heritage Foundation's Allison Auditorium

Are we engaged in a clash of civilizations? The answer is
hardly simple: cultures interact daily, often to everyone's
benefit, free of deadly conflagration, and American culture is in
the ascendancy. But if the end of the Cold War led many to
believe that "globalization" would be accompanied by greater
toleration and harmony, 9/11 abruptly ended that delusion. We
soon (though not soon enough) realized that we must understand the
effect of tradition, history, and ideas, especially in areas where
Islamist radicals find fertile breeding ground. Superior
military power may temporarily prevail against them, but we have
learned, at considerable cost, that other militants all too soon
take their place, skillfully taking advantage of vulnerable
populations. To win the war against our tenacious and
unrelenting enemies in the long run, we must take into account the
cultural "human terrain" where they operate. The essays in
the new anthology, Cultural Intelligence for Winning the
Peace, edited by Dr. Pilon, address this challenge. They
include: the military utility of understanding adversary culture;
factoring in culture as we tackle the challenges of asymmetric
conflict; the importance of avoiding a 'cookie cutter' approach to
disparate societies; the need to address the constantly changing
nature of culture; the phenomenon of female suicide bombers; as
well as on-the-job learning for information officers finding
themselves ill-trained and under-prepared in Iraq and
Afghanistan. And, finally, the need to incorporate cultural
considerations in strategic communication, the critically important
ingredient of the next - some have called it the fifth - generation
of warfare, whose ultimate success is measured by an enduring
rather than illusory peace.

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